The best fables never happened but always seem to be true. That is the case with Pinocchio, the tale of the wooden boy who wants to be a real one, with the nose that grows every time he tells a lie. It was initially told by a Tuscan, Carlo Collodi, in 1883. Pinocchio’s appearance on the silver screen was in 1911. His most famous film was Disney’s version of 1940, which is an animated gem.Suddenly, though, Pinocchio finds a new interpreter in Guillermo del Toro, who is behind both a film (“Pinocchio”) and an accompanying exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, “Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio.” The museum show, up through April 15, has been installed smack in the high temple of contemporary art, suggesting that Mr. del Toro is also a magus. Mr. del Toro pitches himself as a disciple of Pinocchio, telling the museum that “No art form has influenced my life and my work more than animation, and no single character in history has had as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio.” The selection of time-lapse, motion study, and animation software videos speak to a director immersed in technology and detail.It seems that not only does Mr. del Toro enjoy the sausage; he wants to know how it gets made, and for you to know as well. In its own words, “Crafting” aims to disclose the “process behind” Mr. del Toro’s “first stop-motion animation film” and to provide a “behind-the-scenes look” at the process that preceded the final cinematic product.We get mood boards and “look development” paraphernalia, as well as a bulletin board with head shots of all the animators who worked on the movie. The curator, Ron Magliozzi, tells the Sun that Mr. del Toro is one of the few figures who can make a splash at both “ComicCon and Cannes.” That speaks to a creative vision that refuses the segregation of high and low culture.Guillermo del Toro on the set of ‘Pinocchio,’ 2022. Image courtesy of Jason Schmidt/Netflix.Gesturing toward a room full of puppets, Mr. Magliozzi notes that it is a “big deal” for such a show to go up just feet from works by van Gogh and Picasso. Even modern art has its totems, and its taboos. MoMa explains that the exhibit is an immersion in the “art of stop-motion,” the medium Mr. del Toro chose for the film.This is a natural choice for Pinocchio, because the technique shares much with puppetry, most notably the use of a physical object (rather than computer generated images, or, to use the jargon, “CGI”) whose movements are captured in tight increments, which conveys a sense of not entirely smooth movement, herky jerky, and just shy of lifelike. The stop motion maestros work for a Portland animation studio called ShadowMachine, which is credited throughout the show. This is a reminder that making movies, unlike canvases, is a collaborative process that links man and machine as well as an armada of illustrators, technicians, producers, and the like.Another sign of the time is the frequent citation to the “Netflix Physical Assets & Archives,” where presumably much of our art lives, now. The objects on display are wonderful. Puppets that look as if they could walk out of the case, sets in miniature that only need a looking glass, or top flight digital technology, to animate into a world.There is a disassembled Pinocchio, all screws and fingers and femurs, that could double as one of Leonardo da Vinci’s cadavers, minutely cataloged and rendered. A dogfish head appears lifted from Hieronymus Bosch. Everywhere there is care for particulars. Mr. del Toro’s Pinocchio is an eerie creation, halfway between elf and ghoul, humanoid but not entirely human.Yet there is pathos and yearning in the eyes of his Pinocchio, as if his wanting to be a real boy and knowledge of the impossibility of that dream play out on a continuous loop on his face. Not only there, as Mr. del Toro’s version is set in Fascist Italy during World War II, making the trials of this child of wood allegories for vast suffering of flesh and blood.Mr. del Toro has long been an expositor of the supernatural. Movies like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Shape of Water,” and “Hellboy” evince a fluency in the dark fairy tale. They are products of a mind whose homeland is night time. “Crafting” brings that sensibility to MoMa’s sunlit halls, hoisting to the cultural center stage an Academy Award winning director who wants to be seen, at least by the mandarins at MoMa, as a real artist.
